"Suppose the Great Powers of the World a row of straw bee-skeps, susceptible of being upset by a Hohenzollern kick! Will the mailed toe of Imperial Germany refrain from giving it—invading France through the lost Alsace-Lorraine provinces, the moment Austria-Hungary gets to grips with the Russian bear? Britain is France’s ally, bound in Honour to support her. Now you understand what vital questions the Chancellories of the world were burning electric light and brain-power and eyesight over, the long night through, while you and I——" She stopped him: "You make me think!—You have told me—That man who has taken my darling is a German Flying Officer. He may have had some urgent, secret reason for quitting England at once!" "It is more than probable that he carried dispatches of importance. But I can answer no questions on that point. I should be verging, if I did, on a betrayal of confidence." Lynette Saxham looked at her husband earnestly, and the change wrought in her by the long night’s vigil of sorrow sent a pang through the man’s heart. That line of anxiety between the slender eyebrows and the bluish shadows round the golden eyes came to him, like the sorrowful sweetness of the exquisite lips, out of the past. "Why do the Germans hate us?" she asked, and he answered wearily and sombrely: "As the nation with which Germany runs neck and neck in military armament, national wealth and influence, Germans pay us British the compliment of dislike. German ambition, spreading rank and high, is checked in the attainment of its ends even by our geographical position. We carry in our veins too large a share of Teutonic blood, to be ingratiating or subservient to our arrogant and domineering neighbours. What hatred is bitterer than racial hatred? Where is enmity deadlier than that one finds existing between women and men of kindred blood?" The face of David, fair and debonair, rose up before Saxham as he said it. Strange! that even while he thanked his stars for David’s ancient treachery, the fact of the betrayal should rankle in the Doctor still. "Nowhere is there hatred more terrible. Listen, Owen—there is something I want to tell you——" Lynette shivered and drew the fleecy shawl more closely about her white bare throat, and the slender shoulders and arms that were revealed through the laces of her filmy dinner-gown: